Management of Mobile Agent Systems: Learning From the Ants

摘要

The management of mobile agent systems that solve problems in a network is an issue that must be addressed if mobile agents are to be deployed industrially. While centralized solutions are possible, where agent information is maintained on well-known servers, this is hardly desirable when distributed problem solving is one of the motivating reasons for employing mobile agents. It is clear that insufficient or excessive numbers of agents can cause the problem solving capabilities of an agent-based system to be impaired. Also, agents being software entities are almost always flawed therefore requiring the upgrade problem to be solved. This paper presents distributed algorithms based upon ant social behaviour that solve the problems of agent density maintenance and the agent upgrade problem.